Remember
to submit your plays to this year’s Hendrix-Murphy Foundation Playwriting
Contests by midnight Friday, December 8, if you are submitting them by email
(send to vanaman@hendrix.edu). If you are mailing them, be sure they are
postmarked by December 8.
The Hendrix-Murphy
Playwriting Contest was proposed in 1985 by then-students Werner Trieschmann ’86
and Doug Blackmon ’86, and by theatre faculty Rosemary Henenberg and Frank
Roland. The program was designed to cultivate the skills of fledgling
playwrights who are current or former Hendrix students. A professional
playwright judges competitions; one for students and the other for alumni. Cash
prizes are awarded to plays of significant merit, and every entrant receives an
evaluation by the judge.
Playwright
Sofya Weitz will be the contest judge again this year. She has developed work
with JACK, Dixon Place, the Araca Group, PlayXPlay, and The Tank, among others.
She’s been a finalist for the Downstage Left Residency and Next Act Theatre and
was nominated for the 2016 PoNY Fellowship. She’s had commissions with The
Motor Company, Steep Theatre and Chinatown Soup (to write plays in conversation
with visual art pieces), where she recently received a space grant. Sofya was a
recent finalist for the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Heideman award and has also
produced and directed short films, pilots and play festivals. She received her
MFA in Writing for the Screen & Stage from Northwestern University and
currently teaches writing at St. John’s University.
Last
year’s first place winners were Allison Price ’17 in the student competition
and Mark Stephens ’70 in the alumni contest.
Allison Price
’17 was a senior creative writing major, with a minor in Theatre, from
Starkville, Mississippi. After being accepted into more than one graduate
program, she is currently living in Little Rock and considering her choices.
Her play, The Immortal Katie Stewart,
is about what happens when a fairy
godmother gives a young girl the opportunity to become Cinderella and she
decides to become immortal instead,” according to Allison. Playwriting contest
judge Sofya Weitz describes the play as a “delightful, funny, and fast-moving
story.”
Mark
Stephens ’70 received a B.A. in Visual Arts from Hendrix and went on to earn an
M.F.A. in Sculpture from Southern Methodist University. He received a
Fulbright-Hayes Scholarship Award, one of two awarded to American Sculptors for
them to study and work in Italy under masters of stone carving. He was a stone
mason to Westminster Abbey and Hampton Court while working for Gilbert and
Turnbull Contractors in London, England. He currently lives in West Sussex,
England, and is a writer and a self-employed sculptor in stone. In his play, Willow Creek, several characters are
based on people he knows in England, even though the play takes place in
America. The minister in the play is based on his father, whom Mark admired and
loved for his intellectuality, and for his passion for classical music and
great literature. The playwriting contest judge described his play as “a melodic,
lulling and intellectually interesting rumination on family life, the dynamic
of home, the juxtaposition of nature versus civilization, all while dabbling in
themes of natural preservation, faith, Christianity, and capitalism.” She also
noted that “a real strength of this piece is the hypnotic way the story and
characters draw you into their world.”
This program
is sponsored by the Hendrix-Murphy Foundation Programs in Literature and
Language, which are designed to enhance and enrich the study and teaching of
literature and language at Hendrix College. For more information about this and
future events, please contact Henryetta Vanaman at 501-450-4597 or
vanaman@hendrix.edu.